p.s. People asking "Why 23 characters?", it's because a long time ago on Twitter links were counted as 23 characters by Twitter replacing all posted links with their own link shorteners (which meant Twitter could track what people clicked). These shorteners were always 23 characters long.

Mastodon provided a more privacy-friendly alternative to this by leaving the links intact without a shortener, but still only counted them as 23 characters.

p.p.s. Google announced today that they are shutting down their link shortener service goo.gl. From 2025, goo.gl shortened links will no longer work:

developers.googleblog.com/en/g…

This is why link shorteners cause link rot, because eventually link shortener services close down, even ones run by megacorporations, and all their links break.

Your link will survive a lot longer if you avoid using shorteners. You don't need shorteners on Mastodon, all links count as 23 characters anyway.

Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available

Understand how you will be impacted by our decision to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.

^{developers.googleblog.com}